This is what my life looks like right now. (Full disclosure: I actually took these over the course of a week, but only because I could never remember to keep taking photos once I’d started. I could relatively easily re-enact a day where I took all of these photos.)
This is our street when we leave for school in the morning (good thing we bought bike lights!). Cars and delivery trucks are allowed on Via Museo until 10 a.m.; in reality, delivery trucks sneak through most of the day, but it is CROWDED with humans and dogs and bikes, so the vehicles move slowly.
This is Camilla. She is so much more gentile than she is bellissima. She is crazy about the boys who live in her house (each of whom is in each of our kid’s classes). She was dropping her kids off for school when I took this photo.
There is so much good street art in this city—and every place I’ve traveled in Italy, actually.
While Bolzano has some great playgrounds, this middle school’s outdoor space is just a concrete rectangle—and it doesn’t even have basketball hoops! To be fair, this is the densest part of the city. In the foreground are my groceries in my new bike basket on my unlovely-but-very useful secondhand bike. We park our bikes here at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, and we lock them, hoping that the unlocked bikes will walk away before ours do.
We found a scarecrow and some sheep while out on a trail run.
This is the view from Ponte Campiglio over the Isarco (in Italian) or Eisack (in German). In the Südtirol, signs are in both Italian and German; and I’m actually more likely to be greeted in German than in Italian (although that could be more a function of what I look like than of the speaker’s first language, because nearly everyone is at least bilingual in Italian and German).
The Ponte Campiglio is part of the kids’ daily commute to school, so we either ride our bikes over it or walk over it after taking the bus.
I still can’t quite wrap my head around the view from outside our children’s school. The mountain in the background is Sciliar (Schlern in German). We haven’t met the horses yet, but that’s a goal.
Sometimes, a mom just wants an Eiskaffee (menus only have the German word for it, just like apricot bread is only Aprikosenbrot at the best nearby panificio/Bäckerei; I guess some things work just fine in only one language).
Street art. Stay tuned for a graffiti post.
